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WHAT IS THE EGO?

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CHAPTER I.

STRAUSS AS A THEOLOGIAN.

HERE are many reasons which make it probable that the nineteenth century may be named by future historians of theology after Strauss, as the sixteenth century is named after Luther. And this not because he has been remarkably fertile in original ideas; for the only part of his doctrine which can be claimed as peculiarly his own is the so-called mythical explanation of the primitive Christian history, and this view has been in some measure surrendered by subsequent criticism. Nor, again, would the charm and lucidity of his style alone suffice to give him a more permanent place in the history of thought than the author of "Ecce Homo." Nor would the fact that, for the last forty years he has been the most solitary and unpopular man in Europe, give him a claim to mark the epoch. But-and here lies the reason he has been the most unpopular man in Europe for the same reason that the conscience is the least amiable and esteemed of all the human faculties. He has been the "evil conscience," "the candid friend" of a time of transition; he has spoken when men would willingly have kept silence; he has divided what successive schools have laboured to unite; he has ripped up every compromise, he has probed remorselessly every wound; and has exhibited all the nakedness and deformity of the Christian spirit during its period of decay.

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And this peculiar relation to the age seems to be one reason, though, as I shall show hereafter, not the only reason, why Dr. Strauss, when writing of theological matters, always moves in an atmosphere of chagrin. His pages-especially the pages of his more recent worksare full of explosions of displeasure. What, then, has the age done to make appropriate so irritable a critic? Apart from a good deal of personal soreness, it is the "soothing equivocation," the inevitable disingenuousness with which men compose their minds to rest, in order to proceed to the daily work of life without the disturbing intrusion of disquieting thoughts; it is the spirit of conciliation which makes of two things one, which is obtuse in descrying differences between things, and quick to note and exaggerate resemblances, which halts on the journey, and endeavours to perpetuate a state of transition in opinion.

Whether, in the performance of this ungrateful task, Dr. Strauss has used the suaviter in modo as much as he might have done consistently with a due adherence to the fortiter in re; whether he has treated in a manner sufficiently tender the embarrassments which religious dissolution entails in persons of refined sensibility who have to deal practically with the prejudices of the public mind, need not be decided here. Neither do I propose to dwell upon the details of the uneventful, though in some respects tragic career of a German literary man, excepting so far as they appear to fill up lacunæ in the transition. through which the mind of Strauss passed at different periods of his life-a transition, as he would have us believe, identical with that through which the European mind has passed also. Whether this identity be a fact, we shall inquire before we have done; but, even if it be only in part a fact, it supplies a sufficient reason for the assertion with which we began, that the nineteenth century will be reckoned hereafter as the age on which Strauss pre-eminently has set his mark.

From the year 1835, when he published the "Life of

Jesus," down to the time of his decease in the beginning of the present year, Dr. Strauss has appeared before the world three times in the character of theologian: each time advocating a different tenet, each time starting from a different point of view, and each time addressing a different audience. In the first period, 1835-1840, the period of the first "Leben Jesu," and of the “Christliche Glaubenslehre," his standpoint is that of Hegel's "Philosophy of Religion"-i.e., a distinctly Christian position, involving the maintenance in their integrity of the great Christian doctrines of the Incarnation and the Atonement; and in insisting upon these he addresses himself as a critical theologian to critical theologians. In 1864, after a silence of a quarter of a century, so far as theology is concerned, he published a revised edition of the "Life of Jesus," in which, no longer addressing the learned, but "the people," he relapses into the rationalistic deism of the English school of the last century, which, in the "Leben Jesu," he had condemned as insufficient (unzulänglich), empty (leer), and unworthy of the nineteenth century ("Leben Jesu," SS 147-8). And finally, in 1872, in his "Confession," he writes for a class of readers who are neither critical theologians nor "the people,” but a group of restricted dimensions, which he calls wir, we i.e., people who agree with him in holding the positions to which, at the end of his life, he has at length attained. Those positions are neither Christian nor deistic, but may be roughly, though not inaccurately, denominated the positions of modern physical science or methodized

common sense.

Now these transformations of opinion taking place within the area of a single life, would be in themselves sufficiently remarkable, and the explanation of them would present a psychological problem of no ordinary difficulty. But what is still more remarkable is, that these stadia, which the mind of Strauss passes through during his lifetime, are the same as those which the

theological movement of Europe had traversed during the two preceding centuries, only, in spite of assertions to the contrary, in precisely the reverse order.

Let us see what that movement has been, and how it arose from the previous development of Christian doctrine. If we examine the structure of religious dogma, we shall find that it consists of two elements-a particular element, and a general or ideal element; and that the tendency of the general element is, in the course of the development of the religious consciousness, to become more general, and to absorb into itself the particular element. Thus, if we compare the ancient religion of the Jews with that of any other nation, we find that their idea of God contained within it these two mutually contradictory factors. On the one hand, Jehovah was the national deity of the Hebrew race, in the same sense as the heathen gods were national gods; and yet, on the other hand, unlike the gods of the heathen religions, Jehovah is the God of the whole of mankind. That isthe idea of Deity was to the Jews on the one side a particular, and on the other side a general conception. The element of generality, though latent from the first, even when Jehovah is spoken of as pre-eminently "our,” "thy," and "their" God, in distinction from "other" and "strange" gods, only grew up with time. The comparison of "ours" and "strange" does not necessarily go beyond the particular. Even the command, "Thou shalt have no other gods before me," does not explicitly do so. But so soon as the Jews came to ask, "Who is there among the gods that can be compared with Jehovah?" it was needful to go only one step farther in the same direction to say, "The idols of the heathen are but silver and gold, the work of men's hands: they have mouths, but they speak not; eyes have they, but they see not; they have ears and hear not; neither is there any breath in their mouths." By this negation, then, the generality in the Jewish idea of God becomes complete.

Similarly, when we read of the ordinance of sacrifices to be offered at specified times and places, and consisting of specified victims, we feel that we are still moving in the region of the particular; but when the prophet says, "Sacrifice and burnt offering for sin thou wouldest not, but mine ear hast thou pierced"-i.e., taken me irrevocably as thy servant; the generality involved in the idea of a permanent state of sacrifice in the moral and religious life, has absorbed into itself the multitudinous and recurring ordinances of the sacrificial cultus.

So Christianity in its primary aspect appears as a further generalization of the old religion, and as giving a meaning to it. The Jehovah of the Jew, as we have seen, had become, from being the God of a nation, the God of the whole of mankind: but he was not conceived as having definite relations with any nation outside the covenant; his relations to the rest of mankind were either non-existent or vague and indeterminate. To the Christian consciousness, on the other hand, this particular relation becomes generalized in a two-fold manner: it becomes not merely a relation to every nation and to every human being composing it, but it becomes a paternal and permanent, and no longer a merely covenanted and so precarious, relation, dependent upon conditions and upon the observance of the Mosaic law. So again with regard to the old sacrificial cultus, the Christian idea of one continual and all-sufficing sacrifice is the permanent generality which, while it gives a meaning to the particular ordinances, supersedes them by summing them up in itself.

An objection may here be made to this view of the development of religious dogma by successive expansion of its generality, that Christianity itself introduced into the religious consciousness a series of new particulars, in the shape of the historical events occurring at a particular place, under particular circumstances and in a particular year, which the paternal relation of God to